Review: Good Bottled Beer Guide

The problem with bottled beer is that there's far too much of the damned stuff. Only a few years ago I could walk into my regular shopping haunts and be greeted by the same couple of dozen familiar bottles. Seen them, drank them, found most of them to be boring. Nowadays, the blighters are getting everywhere and multiplying faster than rampant yeast - supermarkets have competitions, farmer's markets often have brewers' stalls, off-licenses are carving out a niche and as for t'internet...

All this choice is great, but you still need guidance on which bottle to plump for. With brewer's label blurb often leaving a lot to the imagination, a concise third-party guide would aid weary topers as they wend their way around the shops. And here's where Jeff Evans rides to the rescue. For the last eleven years, he's edited the Good Bottled Beer Guide produced by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the latest edition (the seventh) proves to be even more indispensable than ever.

CAMRA are rightly proud of their 'Real Ale in a Bottle' accreditation scheme and this Guide is a proud flagbearer for it. All of the beers featured in the guide are bottle-conditioned - where yeast has been kept in the bottle, allowing the beer to ferment again. This means there's no place for the thousands of bottled beers that are filtered and/or pasturised but that still leaves more than enough to talk about.

Jeff's done a sterling job of cramming in a ton of salient stuff without compromising the book's clarity and usability. Over 1300 bottle-conditioned beers are listed here with just under a third of those benefiting from detailed tasting notes and background information. That's the real value of the book for me; thirteen sections dividing beers by style with a short overview, followed by well laid-out reviews of individual beers. The detail given on hops and malts is a useful insight, some of the potted histories are genuinely interesting and the tasting notes actually make sense. The latter is a challenge when reviewing a multiplicity of beers under a distinctive style, like India Pale Ale for example; there are only so many ways you can rearrange the words citrus/tangy/tropical whilst namechecking oranges, lemons and pineapples but Jeff Evans carries it off well.



It's a good looking book, inside and out, with an soft embossed cover and a clear layout. There's appropriate use of photos and logos, never swamping the text. And the compact format (7.5 x 4.5 inches) makes it more-or-less jacket pocket sized, ideal for when you're beer buying out and about.

The ratings system is straightforward - a star to highlight beers of "outstanding quality" and a rosette to identify breweries producing beer of a "consistently high standard". Some readers will want more ratings info - I'd be happy with none at all. When the tasting notes are so detailed, I'd rather base my purchase on that information.

There's plenty of added reference detail in here, too; a comprehensive brewery A-Z with contact details along with a list of notable retailers (both 'real world' shops and internet sites). The mini-essays prove to be interesting reading, particularly for the beer novice with "Brewing for the Bottle" and "Growing Old Gracefully" giving concise overviews of the brewing process and bottle aging respectively.

Some of the ancillary stuff I could do without; the now-ubiquitous food matching advice proves little more than the fact that cheese goes with most beer and the international section (although well written) mentions too many beers that are difficult to get hold of in the UK, even through specialist retailers.

One thing that proved a little frustrating was the lack of cross referencing between the brewery beer lists and the main content of the book - it would have been useful to know which beers merited a full review. Having found a brewery I like, the only way I could find more beer reviews for that brewer was to plough through the whole book, one section at a time.

But the proof of a beer review book is in the drinking. I found a beer knocking around the cellar that I hadn't tried before - Meantime's London Pale Ale - and compared my tasting notes with the Guide. Which pretty much nailed it; earthy hops, lilting sweetness, dry finish. I got a real mineral edge in there as well. If I'd bought the beer on the strength of the book's review, I certainly wouldn't have been disappointed.

Faced with an ever-growing amount of bottled-conditioned beer on the market, the Good Bottled Beer Guide is an indispensable reference.

You can buy it at your friendly local neighbourhood bookseller for £12.99. Online deals are invariably cheaper. But why not buy direct from CAMRA - that way, they get a larger share of the profit to plough back into campaigning.